By bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles, Rutherford demonstrated the production of a different element, oxygen. "Playing with marbles" is what he called it; the newspapers reported that Rutherford had "split the atom." After his death in 1937, Rutherford's remains were buried in Westminster Abbey near those of Sir Isaac Newton.
Joseph John Thompson was born on December 18, 1856 near Manchester, England. His father died when "J.J." was only sixteen. The young Thomson attended Owens College in Manchester, where his professor of mathematics encouraged him to apply for a scholarship at Trinity College, one of the most prestigious of the colleges at Cambridge University. Thomson won the scholarship, and in 1880 finished second in his class (behind Joseph Larmor) in the grueling graduation examination in mathematics. Trinity gave him a fellowship and he stayed on there, trying to craft mathematical models that would reveal the nature of atoms and electromagnetic forces. .
The English experimentalist William Crookes, b. June 17, 1832, d. Apr. 4, 1919, contributed to many of the new fields of physics and chemistry that emerged in the late 19th century. His investigations of the photographic process in the 1850s motivated his work in the new science of spectroscopy. Using its techniques, Crookes discovered (1861) the element thallium, which won him election to the Royal Society. His efforts in determining the weight of thallium in an evacuated chamber led to his research in vacuum physics. Crookes invented the radiometer in 1875 and, beginning in 1878, investigated electrical discharges through highly evacuated "Crookes tubes." These studies laid the foundation for J. J. Thomson's research in the late 1890s concerning discharge-tube phenomena. At the age of 68, Crookes began investigating the phenomenon of radioactivity, which had been discovered in 1896, and invented a device that detected alpha particles emitted from radioactive material.
